A Rap Star at His Peak, With Fans to Let Down
Last December, when the New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne released his fifth album, “Tha Carter II,” he sounded like a rapper with something to prove. It was his first CD without his longtime partner, the producer Mannie Fresh. And Lil Wayne worked overtime, using his croaky voice to deliver sharply written rhymes. (To a mouthy enemy: “You need sutures on your smoochers, boy.”) The former teenage star was feeling grown, and he gave himself a new title: “Best rapper alive.”
Lil Wayne left his fans waiting at an album-release party Monday.
There was also room for resentment, as when Lil Wayne took aim at parochial hip-hop stations that shunned Southern rappers. He rhymed, “To the radio stations, I’m tired of being patient/ Stop being rapper-racist/ Region-haters, spectators, dictators.”
One year later, Lil Wayne seems less like an underdog and more like an A-list star. Even without a big pop hit, “Tha Carter II” sold more than a million copies. He followed it with a mixtape, “Dedication 2” (gangstagrillz.com), which ranks among the year’s best hip-hop CDs. He seems to appear (and acquit himself well) on every other remix. He has collaborated with Fat Joe for the song “Make It Rain,” a rising hip-hop hit. And now comes “Like Father, Like Son” (Cash Money/Universal), an affable and mainly excellent collaboration with his longtime mentor Birdman, the New Orleans mogul also known as Baby.
The album hit shops yesterday. And on Monday night, Hot 97 (WQHT-FM), that bastion of New York hip-hop parochialism, organized a big album-release party for Lil Wayne and Birdman at the Roxy. The party was a disaster — or, if you like, a milestone. After all, the heavily promoted album-release-party debacle is something of a New York hip-hop tradition. Not every rapper gets to come to New York and disappoint hundreds of fans. Now Lil Wayne is truly part of the elite.
It really shouldn’t have taken this long. Lil Wayne has been a Southern star since the late 1990s, and it was he who rapped the chorus to the B. G. song “Bling Bling,” which popularized the term. At first, his youth seemed like a gimmick (he didn’t swear on his early recordings), but time and timing conspired to help him grow up: as the Cash Money roster fell apart, the boy wonder started to seem more like the last man standing.
In “Like Father, Like Son,” Birdman (who has never claimed to be a great rapper, let alone the best) sounds less like a stern guardian and more like a jolly uncle. His cheerful boasts make Lil Wayne’s wordplay sound that much geekier:
The rap game is my court,
So I shall walk in comfort like a Rockport
Or some sort of matching slippers, or yacht shoes
See, I don’t cruise control — I control the crews
With one exception (“Don’t Die,” an ill-advised foray into melancholia), these songs keep the spirits high and the subject matter familiar. In “Leather So Soft,” Lil Wayne rhymes about his car’s upholstery, moaning that titular phrase as if someone’s dying. The first single, “Stuntin’ Like My Daddy,” is the kind of gleaming, synthesizer-driven club track that first put New Orleans hip-hop on the map. And “Know What I’m Doin’,” with a sung chorus from T-Pain, was clearly engineered to inspire nightclub singalongs.
But there was no singing along at the Roxy on Monday night. The party was advertised for 9 p.m., and by 11 the club was filling up with a tough but cheerful crowd of hip-hop fans. By 1 a.m., the stage was ready and Mister Cee, the D.J., was announcing the impending arrival of Birdman and Lil Wayne. But then something happened. Mister Cee claimed that the two were having trouble getting past security; he promised to go down and try to help.
Needless to say, the rappers never showed up. By 3 a.m., patrons realized there would be no show, and they started to file out. No doubt they were thinking about the $20 (ladies) or $40 (fellas) they had spent to get in. But whether they knew it or not, these cranky clubgoers were also paying tribute to the absent stars. A club full of New Yorkers had waited all night for a couple of New Orleans rappers. Who says region-haters can’t be rehabilitated?
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